196 COVEUT-SIDE SKETCHES. 



to me now in after-years, as passages of Shakespeare or Milton 

 will come back, like fairy visitors, welcome though unbidden 1 



No poetry in sport ! Truly, not to the man whose sole object 

 in it is to kill, or ride harder than his neighbour, jump more 

 fences, have more falls, or sell his horses at a higher figure, 

 and slaughter more game driven to his gun. He is truly a great 

 man in his way ; so was, in older times, your man who could 

 drink four bottles while his friend succumbed at two. Neither, 

 I fancy, exactly know or knew what they were doing, or de- 

 rived the highest enjoyment from potations or sport. The man 

 who knows exactly when the flavour begins to pall upon the 

 palate has aimed at the true Anacreontic or poetical view, if 

 such there can be, of drinking, which the four-bottle man passes 

 by on the other side unheeded. So do those who merely hunt 

 to ride, or shoot to slay, lose all the true poetry of sport. It is 

 there if they will seek it — the soul which animates the body, 

 to be found and appreciated, if carefully sought for, yet denied 

 to so many. Without it all sport is mere butchery. But where 

 have I wandered, from the death scene at Waters Meet? — a 

 scene few are ever likely to visit. To the fisherman it would 

 be a terra incognita, for he could not throw, neither could he 

 spin, amidst its branches. Of the tourists, who would seek its 

 deep and pathless recesses, save those few who were first of 

 all startled, and then led on by horn and hound on this 

 occasion ? 



I believe that when once the strange visitors were gone, 

 silence settled, " calm and still," on the place again, only to be 

 disturbed by the splash of the fish, the plunge of the otter, the 

 songs of birds overhead, or the rush into the pool, when the 

 great stag comes there to soil. 



Enough : let me now turn to wild stag-hunting, simply as a 

 sport, and nothing more. Perhaps I cannot do this better than 

 by quoting what I wrote on this subject in " Baily's Magazine," 

 December, 1875, slightly altering it here and there to suit my 

 present purpose : — 



